{"id":12020,"date":"2008-12-29T09:50:24","date_gmt":"2008-12-29T08:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/2008\/12\/29\/the-injured-were-lying-there-asking-god-to-let-them-die-2\/"},"modified":"2011-08-06T22:38:43","modified_gmt":"2011-08-06T20:38:43","slug":"the-injured-were-lying-there-asking-god-to-let-them-die-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/2008\/12\/29\/the-injured-were-lying-there-asking-god-to-let-them-die-2\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The injured were lying there asking God to let them die’"},"content":{"rendered":"

000610xc.jpg<\/a><\/p>\n

Te gast: twee ooggetuigenverslagen van de situatie in het belangrijkste ziekenhuis in Gaza: Shifa hospital
\n
\nFikr Shaltoot is a programme coordinator for Medical Aid for Palestinians, a British non-governmental organisation that provides medical supplies in Gaza<\/p>\n

The Guardian, Monday 29 December 2008<\/p>\n

Being a health worker, I had to check the needs of Shifa hospital and the other hospitals in Gaza. The situation in Shifa is really bad. There were corpses in corridors covered with blankets. The mortuary couldn’t cope with the number of bodies. Two bodies were left on stretchers, one wrapped in a blanket. They leave them until families can recognise them.<\/p>\n

There were mothers, fathers looking for children, looking for relatives. Everyone was confused and seeking support. Mothers were crying, people were asking about relatives, the medical team was confused.<\/p>\n

Some people were just lying there, some were screaming, some were very, very angry. There were a lot of injured arriving, ambulances coming in and out. The injured were coming by private cars and they were being left wherever. You could see blood here and there.<\/p>\n

There is talk [the Israeli air strikes] were targeting the police and security forces but in Shifa hospital, I saw many, many civilians, some dead, some injured, some were children, some were women, some were elderly people.<\/p>\n

There are people without their legs in very severe pain. The doctors and nurses were trying to give them painkillers and to keep them alive. Patients are lying there knowing they’ve lost their legs. Some were asking God if they could die. They were in a terrible psychological state.<\/p>\n

The doctors and nurses were trying to do their best. They discharged all the patients from the chronic diseases ward and from the oncology ward to make way for the injured. They were using whatever they could.<\/p>\n

There’s no gauze so they are using cotton, which sticks to the wounds. They can’t sterilise clothes for the operating theatre. They’re using wrong sized syringes. They’re working 24 hours. They’re referring cases from one hospital to the next. One hospital was running out of anaesthesia. They’re also drawing blood and there’s no alcohol. This is a disaster.
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‘There’s a strong likelihood that people are dying needlessly’<\/strong>
\nToni O’Loughlin in Jerusalem
\nThe Guardian, Monday 29 December 2008<\/p>\n

Even before Saturday when dead bodies piled up outside morgues and people with missing limbs were forced to wait for surgery, Gaza’s hospitals were in crisis.<\/p>\n

With power blackouts lasting up to 12 hours a day, 20% of drugs out of stock, medical equipment standing idle for want of spare parts and stores emptied of basic items, doctors had been turning patients away for months.<\/p>\n

“The hospitals in Gaza are in a disastrous situation, starved of essential drugs for months and now overwhelmed with casualties from this onslaught. Only the most serious cases are getting any attention,” said Chris Gunness, the UN’s Relief and Works Agency spokesman. “There’s a strong likelihood that people are dying needlessly.”<\/p>\n

Ever since Israel sealed off Gaza in June 2007, allowing only minimum deliveries, there have been shortages of food, fuel and medical supplies.<\/p>\n

But in the past two months the shortages have become so severe that at Shifa hospital, cleaners were mopping the floor with plain water because there was no disinfectant and the laundry, which was out of hospital grade detergent, was unable to clean blood from blankets. By yesterday doctors were performing surgery in “curtains” as there were no more theatre garments, Dr Khamis El Essi told the BBC.<\/p>\n

The hospital has seen a threefold rise in burns patients as households have been forced to cook on old, pressurised fuel stoves and open fires. Three-quarters are children.<\/p>\n

“Children huddle around fires outside their houses because it’s winter and there’s no electricity for heating in their house and they play around their mothers who are cooking in small rooms with the stoves,” said Ran Yaron, who works with the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights.<\/p>\n

Shifa hospital is forced to rely on markets supplied by the illicit tunnels in the south, administered and taxed by Hamas. Recently it was able to fix a broken sewage pipe in front of the hospital only after purchasing cement from the tunnels.<\/p>\n

“How do the Israelis expect us to live normally with them in the future?” said the head of Shifa’s burns unit, Dr Nafiz Abu Sahban.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Te gast: twee ooggetuigenverslagen van de situatie in het belangrijkste ziekenhuis in Gaza: Shifa hospital<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[2,14],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12020"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12020"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56797,"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12020\/revisions\/56797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}